The netherworld of Mendip

by Ernest A. Baker; H. E. Balch

Our first task was to withdraw this formidable plug. It was a sound, unfissured block of Mountain Limestone, weighing perhaps half a ton. We thought that six men with a rope ought to move it easily; but we could not make it budge. A spade and a crowbar were fetched, with which we laboured diligently for an hour; but the only effect was to drop the stone deeper into the hole. A sledgehammer was now obtained from the nearest smithy, and one after another we attacked the foe with might and main. At length it yielded. Pieces flaked off, and at last it split; the fragments tumbled into the chasm, and the rock, diminished to half its former size, was rolled away. The job had taken two hours and a half, and it was now dark.

Mr. Balch and I cast lots for the honour of the first descent: it fell to me. An Alpine Club rope was tied on as life-line, whilst a 70-foot cotton rope was to be used for lowering and lifting. Slung in a bight of the latter, I was carefully let down over the cliff-like face below the entrance. The cavity formed part of a huge choked swallet, which extended up into the hill above the point where we had been working, and ran away obliquely underneath, so that I was coming down from a hole perforating one corner of the roof. Over against the hole was the steep slope of earth and scree already mentioned, steep almost as a wall, and the scree so loose that it seemed to be in a state of suspended animation. As soon as one came into contact with the treacherous stuff, an avalanche of stones was launched, and I sought in vain for a spot where it would be safe to unrope and await the next man. The cliff down which I had been lowered was undercut by a wide archway, through which I looked into a black, forbidding pit gaping at the bottom. With nowhere to rest, and with the risk of falling stones, it was obviously wiser to finish the descent before another man started.

Tying the loose rope round me (for it was necessary to swing out under the arch), I was let down slowly, and began to slip over a smooth, greasy rock-face into the unknown cavity. At 60 feet from the ground I alighted at the top of a slope of stones, and was able to remove the ropes and scramble to the bottom. Lighting some magnesium wire, I found myself in a bell-shaped chamber about 65 feet high, opening above by the precipitous archway into the upper cavity, and on the other side into an ascending vault running north-west. All around were the indelible marks of water action in the remote past. On the upper side the rocks were carved and pitted as by the swirling of a violent torrent. But there was now no sign of running water, only the drip, drip from the moist roof; and the outlet of the ancient stream at the bottom of the cavern was blocked up by a deep accumulation of débris. Among the countless fragments strewn all over the floor I found a large stone covered with a mass of dog-tooth crystals, clear as diamonds and large as walnuts. But at the very bottom of the place was something even more lovely, myriads upon myriads of exquisite spicules of carbonate, some little more than specks of red, orange, and amber, but thousands like wee tendrils of coral three-eighths of an inch in length. They were the growth, through age after age, of a splash deposit from the roof or from the stream that had disappeared. Such a formation is not rare in water caverns; but in such beauty of shape and hue it is rare indeed, for these tender little crystal flowers took all manner of forms, blossoming ofttimes into wreaths and clusters like a miniature coral. One of the most exquisite and most puzzling features was that the dots and spicules were often arranged in set patterns, symmetrical and even geometrical, in tiny circles, squares, and triangles, by the rhythmic action of the waters that had left this beautiful record of their passage. We named the cave the Coral Cavern.

As the descent had not been direct, and there might be difficulty in recovering the ropes if once let go, it seemed most prudent that no one should follow me down for the present. Climbing the slopes of rocks and scree that led up through a lofty vault to the north-west, I reached a height of considerably more than 100 feet above the floor of the Coral Cavern, the present floor of which is 90 feet below the point of entrance. The open way then came to an end abruptly, in a tiny grotto, at a distance of 240 feet from that point. But hard by there were funnel-like cavities penetrating the roof, and hinting at the proximity of a Secondary swallet hole on the hillside close overhead. Evidently, when the cave was in working order, in times of indefinable remoteness, a big stream had run down this steep vaulted passage, and united with the main stream at the bottom, both then pursuing their way into the fissures of the rock, and ultimately finding an exit into the open air at some point now buried under Triassic deposits. Enormous slabs of Limestone, smooth, and fitting close over each other like boiler-plates, formed the sloping floor of this tunnel on one side. These too were a conspicuous testimony to powerful water action.

At present the red marl of the Trias comes nearly up to the artificial entrance of the cavity. It is obvious that when the cave was occupied by a stream, its waters must have found a vent some distance below the upper limit of the marl; whence it necessarily follows that the marl has been laid down here since that period. Much evidence has been gathered in the course of our cave work in the Mendips to show that many of the caverns are older than the vast accumulations of Dolomitic Conglomerate and other deposits of Triassic age, but nowhere is the proof put so clearly and concisely as by the new cave at Compton Bishop.

My stay underground was cut short by the fear that the others would grow impatient. I was hauled up without mishap, save that at one point the cotton rope stuck fast in a cleft, and I had to pull myself up hand over hand on the life-line. Two men then went down, with the result we had dreaded—the rope could not be got back to the last man without extreme difficulty. Only after tying on stone after stone, and making many a cast in vain, did we ultimately restore communication. He came up; the guardian block was pushed back into its place; and at a late hour we struck down the hillside home.

A day or two later we set out once more to find Phelps's Cavern. It opens on the very crest of the ridge leading up to Crook Hill, or, as it is more commonly known to-day, Crook's Peak, a sharp Limestone spur, running south-east from the western extremity of Wavering Down. At the foot of the hill, near the road, we came across a small cave, called the Fox's Hole, which we searched thoroughly for any continuation upwards or downwards, but in vain. After a great deal of jamming and squeezing, we got in to a distance of 50 feet, where a low chamber has holes between wall and floor that had acted as a water-sink to some ancient system of cavities. But the floor was heaped with stones, and in spite of our efforts to clear these out, we did not discover a single hole big enough to enter. This small cave is, doubtless, but the tail end of the cavern that once existed here; and, indeed, the large cavern at the hilltop must be little more than a fragment of what it was. Crook's Peak seems to be the mere skeleton of a hill. To account for the presence of such a cavern at the summit, one must postulate a large drainage area in days gone by, and a general configuration entirely opposite to the present. The higher part of the hill is but a Limestone shell enclosing these ancient, and now waterless, caverns.

The big cavern is known as Denny's Hole. Descending the sloping side of an open pit, we found ourselves under an arch of mighty span, the crown of which was formed by the rock-wall on the other side. Under this arch the floor sloped precipitously into the jaws of the cavern; then the roof came close down, and the farther passages wound onwards as low tunnels, descending steeply into the entrails of the hill. It is easy enough to get to a considerable depth and distance in the largest of these, but the journey is not specially interesting, for the place has been looted by adventurous rustics, and serious exploration is at present brought to a standstill by the enormous quantities of loose stones filling every cavity in the floor. Coming back to the cave mouth, we were struck by the grandeur of the vestibule, which has every appearance of being the remains of a great subterranean chamber, the pit-like entrance, through which we look up to the sky and the sunshine, being the remnant of a cave-tunnel, once perhaps of very considerable length.

Phelps had alluded to another chamber, of some beauty, to be attained, at the expense of divers wrenches and abrasions, by a certain tortuous passage leading out of the vestibule. After diligent search we found a hole in the floor at one corner, but it seemed to be only a foot or two deep. Kicking about for some time, with body half in and half out of the hole, I managed to shift some loose stones, and felt space below. But the space proved, on experiment, at least as excellent a place of torment as Phelps's description had been able to do justice to. The passage doubled back upon itself at once, and twisted here and there like a corkscrew. Only by obstinate wriggling were we able to worm a way down to the low cavity at the bottom. Two blind passages started therefrom, and in one wall was a long, horizontal slit, with some big place beyond, as we judged from the sound of the stones we threw in. In various cautious attitudes we inserted ourselves into the slit. The drop inside, though fearful to anticipate, was a matter of only a few feet.

The cave we found ourselves in was a sort of double chamber, with vestiges of a partition across the middle; the whole was some 40 feet in length. At one end was a pool of water, stagnant at present, or nearly so. Close by, a low fissure sloped downwards to a vertical hole or pot that sounded deep; but we could not get near it for the spikes of stalactite that guarded it on all sides. This chamber, which we thought must communicate with the series reached by the main passage from the vestibule, seems to have been hardly ever visited. We heard a story of a lady's pet dog that had been lost here for a week, and was not found, although a tempting reward was offered, until a farmer, who told us the story, explored the corkscrew tunnel leading to this cave. He found the poor beast shivering on the edge of the slit we had come in by, afraid to jump. Even the farmer, who thought he knew all the ramifications of this perplexing cavern, did not seem to have reached this chamber, the natural ornaments of which showed no trace of specimen-hunting.